Milton Keynes is Vaporwave

Some short videos I took on a beautiful February morning in Milton Keynes Intu shopping centre. Being there shortly after 9am meant a low level of in-security guards, which made filming easier, even though I pussied out and made very short videos. Recommended listening (click headings to listen on Bandcamp):  Disconscious: Hologram Plaza. An eerie soundtrack to a mall of the mind. Familiar and strange, relaxing and disquieting. Tracks are the kind of bland background music played in a thousand malls, but the use of tinny distortions, layers of echoing reverb and ambient sounds create the melancholic feel of a tape that’s been playing forever, unnoticed and unloved.    猫 シ Corp.:Palm Mall. Another recognised classic in the genre, effectively a double album with the first half comprising ambient mall-sounds and the second half developing into songs to consume to. The first Mallsoft album I really got into, I made a lot of art while listening to ...

Listen to One Hundred Mornings by Windows96 below on either Youtube or their Bandcamp page. Commonly regarded as one of the top Vaporwave releases of 2018. Absolute goodness. https://music.businesscasual.biz/album/one-hundred-mornings

Buddies is an American-themed diner chain of 9 restaurants throughout Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. The one shown here is in Milton Keynes, located at the Old Stratford roundabout on the A5. The soundtrack inside every Buddies restaurant is non-stop 80’s-90’s pop. Wall-mounted screens loop VHS footage of New York streets. The walls are covered in bumper stickers, superheroes and Simpsons imagery. The first Buddies opened in Northampton in1981 and all of the restauran ts use imagery which creates a stubbornly 80’s-90’s aesthetic. The Milton Keynes Buddies has a wall graphic of the New York skyline which includes the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, in part layered over with portraits of Spiderman and Batman. The part-concealment (Is the concealment consciously intentional? Unconsciously intentional? Coincidence?) of the towers means you do have to look harder to see them, but there they are. The appearance of these ghostly landmarks is the only suggesti...

Not Milton Keynes, but this performance venue in Farenhem near Portsmouth has a very faded 90's aesthetic. When you go inside one of the first things that you see is a sign by the council listing all the problems the venue has and how it doesn't meet it's running costs. # vaporwaveaesthetic # vapor # vaporwave # deadmall # 90saesthetic # austerity # vaporwavemk # miltonkeynes # farenham # aesthetic # ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ

The Craufurd Arms in Wolverton using some unashamedly # vaporwave graphics here for this poster. Also they have some of the worst, saddest looking fake plants ever outside which adds to the effect. # craufurdarms # wolverton # mk # miltonkeynes # vaporwaveuk # vaporwaveaesthetic # ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ

We believe Milton Keynes, a ‘new town’ in the centre of England offers particular opportunities to experience life through the lens of the cultural movement that is Vaporwave. Vaporwave is an internet-based form of electronic music and art which particularly uses appropriation of 1980s and 1990s mood music styles such as smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music. It also incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objec ts, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos. Vaporwave’s preoccupation with 1980’s-1990’s aesthetics offers a particularly ambivalent take on nostalgia, often with an elusive sense of melancholy or loss. Vaporwave artists often play with ideas around memory as a distorted, unreliable construction of the past. Vaporwave offers us an opportunity to notice what is designed to be unnoticed- the smooth-jazz and R&B playing in the background of a 1000 shopping malls, the...